It occurred to me recently that the act of ‘tweeting’ actually has been around a long time. While Twitter is now mainstreamed as a common way to send short, bursty messages, the act itself is really an old practice found in traditional media channels. Consider these examples :

telegrams

stock ticker

newspaper headlines

sports scores

magazine articles

billboard advertisements

voice mail

In each of those forms, there is a focused message to quickly grab interest and convey enough information to entice the reader to obtain more information. Except for voice mail of course – you get the idea.

And this is not limited to just text, either. We also capture and share images via Flickr, picasso and such to communicate visually.

So, while we talk a lot about the tool whether it is Flickr, Twitter or whatever, we have used short form messaging in various forms for some time. Are we getting better at it? Are we more or less focused as a result?